‘Asabiyyah Watch

Reparations — Ok, Let’s Talk

Teasing apart root and proximate causes

This one’s not absurd on its face, but it walks close to that line. Credit to Bill Maher, as usual, for role modeling for the country what political debate in a pluralistic Tranquil Union could look like. (Watch all 15 minutes, esp. for triple 2024 Grammy winner Killer Mike’s hyper-localism pitch at the end … run at 1.75x if you’re really squeezed for time.)

BLUF: Start with a hyper-local longitudinal (1 generation minimum) experiment in the heart of Dixie/CSA, say, Atlanta, Charleston or Birmingham. Starting in a blue/Union state like California or New York or Michigan is absurd.

Disclaimer up front also: I have dear extended family members with African ancestry, and immediate family members with Asian ancestry, but my own is ~100% European (at least the part ancestry.com has been able to find), about half of the migrants via the Virginia ports of entry in the 17th and 18th century, and I identify ethnically as “just American”. I spent my youth in Pennsylvania, the first half of my adulthood in the greater Boston Bay Area, and the second half in San Francisco’s.

Feel free to stop reading here if you’re one of those blue side hardwareist bigots who dismiss out of hand anything coming from White Men.

Introduction

Reparations for descendants of African slaves in America (for shorthand, let’s just say “Black Americans”) as a matter of justice turns on clear analyses of (a) the injustices, (b) the causes/perpetrators, and (c) the fairness of the corrective actions.

Proponents of reparations (“ProReps” for short hereafter) contend that the evidence for (a) boils down to the simple disparities on most life outcome metrics (health, income & wealth, education, opportunity, life expectancy, …) between Black Americans and everyone else. They also argue that (b) are root ones: racism/white supremacy spanning the past and present, resulting in systemic discrimination against blacks. They conclude for (c) that the corrective actions will be fair only when the disparities no longer exist, and the fastest path to that end is simple cash payments. QED

Opponents contest all three.

They argue that disparities exist everywhere and cut across lines of race, ethnicity, geography, heritage, education level, occupation, marital and family composition, etc… In the specific case of Black Americans, the causes (they say) are mostly proximate ones, based on multi-generational erosion of the basic molecule of society, the nuclear family, and self-inflicted ethnic value choices (more below). This adds up to a view that there is no systemic injustice to be corrected.

And so the standoff, as exemplified by NH Gov. Chris Sununu’s simple “No, I’m not for reparations” at the 02:40 mark of the Maher video clip.

I categorize Sununu as an archetype traditional center-red Northeastern Republican. The type who I think are correct on many issues, but don’t quite have enough empathy for the less fortunate. Not surprising given the demographics and history of his state¹ that he doesn’t think the issue has enough merit to debate.

The geographic aspect will serve as my Next Steps proposal’s entry point, as teased in the BLUF above.

To elaborate briefly: if you really want to go to the root cause, you have to rewind all the way back to West Africa, as the enslavers were fellow Africans. This is a point the ProReps wave away, in their oversimplifications (along with the hundreds of thousands of white Americans who gave their lives to end slavery).

I agree that sending the tab for reparations back to, say, Ghana, Senegal and Angola would be a reductio ad absurdum. “Firing for effect”, in the business, not military sense.

In all seriousness, it raises the critical issue, though, of when and where to snap the chalk line, in terms of responsible party for the alleged injustices. It’s equally absurd to hold California taxpayers in 2024 liable², when 60% of them are non-”White Alone”; African slavery was never legal in the state; it fought on the Union side; only tiny fractions of the population can trace ancestry to residents here prior to Emancipation; there’s no case that can be made that our vibrant technology, media, entertainment, energy, agriculture, tourism and finance economy is in any way based on a system of the exploitation of black labor. (Hispanic in the Ag sector, arguably … but that’s for another analysis.)

Only slightly less nutty than starting in Alaska or Hawaii.

(All of the examples given in the Introduction to the CA Reparations Task Force report represent cases of individual wrongs/torts, not class ones. The return of Bruce’s Beach as a precedent is a good one. You have to really wave your hands, though, to argue that, say, a poor black child whose family sent him from Arkansas to Alameda County this century, and who received a K-12 taxpayer-subsidized quarter-million dollar public education is now owed a further cash payment because specific black home buyers were red-lined in the 1950s.)

Moving up the timeline, searching for a non-absurd geographic starting point, let’s go next to South Carolina, the insertion point for the Barbadian slavery model into the original 13 colonies:

South Carolina’s origins are so closely tied to the British West Indian colony of Barbados that it has been called a “Colony of a Colony.” The historian Jack Greene has called Barbados the “culture hearth” of the southeastern, slavery-dominated plantation economy.

And let’s not forget SC’s later prominent roles in the vanguard of the defense of slavery: John C. Calhoun; the first declaration of secession; the firing on Fort Sumter; the bringing of physical violence to the chambers of Congress; Strom Thurmond; and so on.

The Palmetto State would get my vote, but as a practical matter, not likely.

Bringing us to a compromise candidate: Killer Mike’s home turf of Atlanta and the state of Georgia. The only Big Six swing/purple state in Dixie³; the only among the top three in % black population that isn’t also poor (ranking in the middle of the pack on GDP per capita); a center of business, culture and especially black entrepreneurship, middle class and decades of successful political leadership; the cradle of civil rights, home of MLK Jr and non-MAGA (= sane) GOP statewide officers; …

The Black Mecca, the Hollywood of the South.

Upshot: if you can’t convince super-majorities of Atlantans and Georgians to plump for reparations, don’t expect it anywhere else. If you want to increase polarization rather than social cohesion/solidarity/fraternité/’asabiyyah, push reparations through on narrow anti-democratic simple legislative majorities and watch them get repealed by referendum. (In California, cf. Prop 8.)

Problem Identification

Let’s explore whether there is a category of systemic injustice that includes all individual descendants of enslaved Africans, and no one else.

ProReps operate in a paradigm either consciously or not premised on a concept of Equality that has never been the American one, namely that the only thing that matters is Outcomes. Now, one is free to dogmatize on that moral/axiological question. What one is not free to do is to argue Equality of Outcome is a First Principle of the USA. That’s just historically false.

Unlike (most notably) France, equality is not even one of the purposes of the state created by our Constitution, given in the opening sentence of the Preamble. Yes, yes, Thomas Jefferson’s famous “all men are created equal” a decade before in the Declaration of Independence confuses many. That was just a claim against Divine Right hereditary nobility/aristocracy classes, like back in Ye Olde Country/Continent … a point on which Adams disagreed, considering Birth an important pillar of qualifying as among the “best men”, whom both believed should rule.

At most, among the Founders, “equality” meant “one vote per one man of property, independent of birth”. They would have considered Equality of Outcome and its associated rule of collective ownership risible pie-in-the-sky follies. They came a century before Fourier, Owen, the Chartists and Marx&Engels, after all.

Granted, things change over time, and it would be interesting to see a 2024 update of the Pew Research 2020 report on American Views on Economic Inequality. At that time, immediately pre-pandemic, while the 60% super-majority line was reached on the simple question of whether there’s too much inequality, the only two corrective measures that did so were:

• “Ensuring workers have the skills they need for today’s jobs” [hold this thought]
• “Increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans”

As for opinions on causes of the inequality, there’s not a single factor that registers even 50% support. Less than a third (including only half of the blues) blame racial and ethnic discrimination.

Intriguingly, the top three factors hint at possible common ground solutions:

• The tax system 45%
• Problems with the educational system 44%
• The different life choices people make 42%

None of these implies a reparations cash payout.

To hover for a bit on one of Purple Reign’s recurring top prescriptions (hobby-horses, if you prefer) cutting across most of Our chronic ailments as a country/polity: education.

I can hear the Killer Mike diss track now, but I’m going to use data from the Oakland Unified School District to support the argument that Black Americans already receive reparations, and have since at least the 1960s, in the form of education subsidies/transfers (plus of course the privilege of Affirmative Action admission advantages, at least until recently).

To the tune of what amounts to between $13,000 and $20,000 per year, depending on the analysis (which is trickier than one would hope as a taxpayer). Multiplied by the full thirteen K-12 years, roughly $150,000 — $260,000 per child. A cool quarter-mil.

[Yes, describing this as a subsidy presupposes that the student’s family has not paid that amount in taxes to the city and state. We could go there if anyone thinks that’s critical for the analysis. Since over 80% of the enrolled students are eligible for free and reduced price lunches, and only 11% of the revenues come from local sources and the rest from the state, it’s a fairly safe description. The exact amount TBD.]

And yet, in terms of graduation outcomes, persistent under-performance by the African American cohort relative to their ethnic White and Asian peers. At the extreme, only 36% of the former graduate completing the “A-G” requirements for admission to the UC/CSU public higher education system, compared to 78% for Whites.

I would kick that one over to Killer Mike for a response. Do the parents and guardians of that 40% gap kids bear no accountability whatsoever? Do they get to punt to the “systemic racism” excuse? You’re never going to convince Hispanic, Indian and Chinese immigrant parents who fetishize education that they now should fork over extra tax dollars to compensate for that opportunity unrealized.

Attempting to guilt and/or browbeat them into doing so will only backfire.

Or if it’s not too close to home for Killer Mike, is it unfair to raise the question of responsibility when single women, especially teenagers, have kids? Not all of those babies will have his life privilege of being raised by a grandmother in an affluent middle-class black neighborhood.

ProReps may continue to try to sweep any individual responsibility under the rug of their asserted systemic racism root cause. I think most sensible Americans see it as a mix, per the Pew data referenced above.

A quick mention of another topic that most sensible folk see as a mix, with the intellectuals of both sides doing the polarizing: intelligence as nature or nurture.

Space does not allow for a full treatment here, but if you want to be informed, read up on the Flynn Effect, which supports the mixed view that nurture can close the gap with nature. The part I find the most compelling and relevant to the topic at hand in this essay is the loss of the gain from enriched education in the early years as black youth transit across the challenges of adolescence. Flynn himself kicked up a bit of a fuss late in his life, when he wrote about the importance of family environment, which upset his blue side fans:

“It’s whites, not blacks, who complain,” he says. “Blacks know the score. Facts are facts.”

How true that rings in NorCal.

We’re stuck then at (a). It’s hard to pin down an injustice to the class of descendants of slavery, and none other, for those of us who don’t believe in Equality of Outcomes as a moral good.

Moreover, since I think Gov. Sununu glosses over it a bit too quickly in the video, outnumbered as he is, we can’t let Killer Mike’s howler stand:

“If the black community has more money, this country has more money.”

Um. Flat no, it’s zero sum at the level of the country. The money will have to come either from taxes or debt⁴.

If the ProReps want to make a case that the country will get more out of this investment than all of the other ways the tax dollars could be invested, by all means, let’s hear it.

In our federal system, to use Justice Brandeis’s excellent phrase, the laboratories of democracy are at the state and local levels. So let’s see an experiment (or several) in action. This is, after all, how the Universal Basic Income proposals are doing it. Run pilots before claiming future benefits to society simply from conjecture.

For a counter example, look at how drug de-criminalization has gone in places like Portland and San Francisco. In retrospect, might have been wiser to run a few controlled experiments at smaller scale.

Conclusion

If we can’t identify (a), then there’s no point in even digging into (b) and (c). From the definition.

That said, at times you have to just squint at things and get out of the left-brain analysis. I have been pondering Peter Singer’s Rescue Principle since encountering it only recently, a few months ago. In a nutshell:

if you can prevent a very bad thing and don’t, you’re not a moral person

Many aspects of the lives of too many Black Americans qualify as “very bad”. In a stack ranking of such bads (especially weighted for probability of prevention), unclear if they would top the table. But let’s not quibble, and I’ll accept as deontic that We should try.

What might purple/moderate proposed solutions look like? A good place to start is those three Pew common ground hints (see above). For the sake of this strawman, let’s also pin the experiment to be run in Greater Atlanta. All details TBD, just a sketch.

Tax code: drawing on many successful experiments with reducing taxes to stimulate the economy (Deng Xiaoping’s special economic zones, internet commerce, just to list two obvious ones … say what you will about the unintended consequences, the intended goals were met), eliminate the sales tax for black-owned businesses in majority black areas.

I note from the Georgia table of rates for 2024 that there already seems to be one such experiment underway, Fulton County’s Centennial Yards special tax district. Good for them. Expand the experiment.

Yes, it’s a non-zero sum transfer, but with all the existing complexities in the tax code, one that would be hard for red bigots to pinpoint (unless sales tax revenues in GA are earmarked).

Education: As I indicated above, as a John Dewey enthusiast, I believe there’s a direct tie between democracy as an ethics (its only useful sense, IMHO) and education. Look no further than Finland, which often ranks at or near the top of the table for graduate achievement, whose system is based on Dewey. The proof is in the pudding.

Given all the different things that have been tried tinkering with the educational system since Brown v. Board of Education, it’s hard to think of anything novel, but this is certainly the right place to focus.

Atlanta as a hub of HBCU higher education, which seems to produce a healthy black middle class, do they already have a formula?

Another possible wild idea would be to outsource to the Finns. Bring them in as consultants, with free rein. Or the Danes, who have an interesting historical connection to the education of icons of the Civil Rights movement like Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Life choices: This is the hardest and most sensitive one. Yet, if one accepts that the black family has eroded … whether white supremacy is to blame or not … then there’s less yield in trying to affix blame than in brainstorming solutions.

Teenage single motherhood I will assume is well covered and I doubt I have anything to add.

I will focus on teen discretionary time use. (“The Opportunity Cost of Ball” … a Fermi estimate piece in the Purple Reign pipeline.)

Until the most recent boom in generative AI, I would have argued for a big push for coding. Given the Bay Area’s dominance in high tech, plus the existence proof India provides that almost anyone can learn to code if they try hard enough, and that coding is one of the paths of our time into the middle class (if not onward and upward), it’s practically a no-brainer.

Given what seem like breakthroughs in AI, however, that might be shooting behind the duck, as the saying goes. So let’s not make it that specific.

Use basic economic incentives to keep black youth in cognitively enriching activities, to break out of the famous “either hoop or sell dope” doom loop. That one’s only going to work if it’s embraced by those in leadership or influence roles in the black community. Not going to get anywhere if it’s just white techies doing philanthropy.

In Killer Mike’s spirit of talking and working together around the table, I’m throwing that one out there. I spent long enough in the tech world to know that while individual bosses (Elon Musk et al.) might be or tilt libertarian-let-them-eat-brioche-red, the cultures of the corporations and the rank and file lean blue.

But there’s been more supply of willing volunteers and docents to try to get black youth as excited about tech/STEM as their peers on the other side of the Pacific than there’s been demand.

Bottom line: cash payouts right now are a bad idea, but running pilots to keep trying to close the gap is a good one. Solutions that unite rather than divide only.

Notes:

[1] Fwiw, I began my adulthood in the Granite State (93% White according to the 2020 census, where both Asians and Hispanics outnumber Blacks by themselves), and I get that PoV. When I lived there, it wasn’t nearly as overtly racist as Boston, but its “Live Free or Die” motto of radical individualism continued its history of subtly discouraging Black in-migration.

Although in fairness, it was also one of the earliest states to grant Black men the vote, in 1860; and, it sent 40,000 soldiers (~10% of the total population) to fight the CSA, a fifth of whom gave the ultimate sacrifice.

[2] The report of the California Reparations Task Force, issued on June 29, 2023 lays out the arguments for reparations in extensive, 40 chapter, 1080 page detail. The Task Force consisted of nine members, all reparations advocates and eight of whom would be recipients with the lone non-recipient a Japanese American lawyer who has made a career out of the WWII internment case, which is categorically different (the injustice was to the direct recipients of the reparations, not descendants many generations removed).

Not exactly an application of the Rawls original position/veil of ignorance principle, which I think most people in the middle of the horseshoe (if not the philosophers) take as a given … almost a tautology regarding the fairness of rule-making.

[3] Ironic historic factoid: the Georgia colony founded in 1733 prohibited slavery, though that would only last until 1752 when it was taken over by the British Crown, and King George II legalized the “peculiar institution”, probably in emulation-from-envy of the wealth-creation model (= slavery) of its neighbor to the North (see above). Oh, and that last bit heavily influenced by Protestant/Methodist Great Awakening firebrand Reverend George Whitefield, who needed slave labor to finance his orphanages. Typical Abrahamic hypocrisy.

[4] Not to get too geeky about it, but given the definition of ‘money’ as credit, it might be more practical to push solutions that involve favorable credit terms to Black Americans. The existing financial system knows how to reward responsible use of credit, and of course, the opposite. Bail-outs via such favorable loans, as was done back in 2008/2009, are considered a success … the Fed even brags about having made a profit.

One cautionary note: you could argue that Black Americans already got burned by a variant on this theme, namely college loans for classes and degrees that had ROI insufficient to service the debt. (For those not paying close attention to this topic, the racial aspect is why Biden’s College Loan Forgiveness polarizes along the blue-red axis. The red team views it as a sop to the blue team’s MAGA-analog base, black women.)